Method to his madness: Daniel Day-Lewis believes in fully acting the part

After winning the Golden Globe in the best dramatic film actor category Sunday night, Lincoln star Daniel Day-Lewis is favoured to win his third Oscar.

Photograph by: David James
, AP

At the top of a long, winding path in County Wicklow, Ireland, lives Daniel Day-Lewis. Many people consider him to be the best film actor in the world. The problem is getting him to come down the path to make films.

In the past 16 years, he has appeared in just six films. All of them — apart from the flop Nine — were greeted by strong reviews and pleas to show up for work more often.

Yet Day-Lewis, 55, dark-eyed and wreathed in quasi-fantastical lore, has become a near-mystical presence in the minds of modern filmgoers.

His latest film, Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg, and for which on Sunday Day-Lewis won the Golden Globe for best actor, is based on the last months of Abraham Lincoln’s life and took almost 10 years to bring to the screen. The main problem, as Spielberg recalls it, was persuading Day-Lewis to take the role of the Civil War president.

At their first meeting in 2003, the actor declared that he disliked the script and considered the idea of his playing Lincoln “preposterous.” Six years later, Spielberg returned with a new script based on a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin. This time, Day-Lewis thought the project was a good idea — “for someone else.”

Last week, Spielberg produced a letter Day-Lewis had sent him in which the actor explained, “In this case, fascinated as I was by Abe, it was the fascination of a grateful spectator who longed to see a story told, rather than that of a participant.”

Even when he finally signed on, Day-Lewis doubted his choice. “I thought,” he told The New York Times, “this is a very, very bad idea.”

Lincoln is, nevertheless, being hailed as a very, very good movie. Critics in the U.S. are predicting that it will sweep the Oscars, with Day-Lewis considered a virtual certainty to collect his third Best Actor award.

Unfortunately, while the film casts new light on Lincoln, it may serve only to further cloud and complicate our understanding of Day-Lewis.

A worrying number of people in the movie business think, to put it bluntly, that the actor is nuts. Or, at least, that threaded into the brilliance is a degree of obsessive perfectionism that borders on the unhinged. Stories abound of his extreme preparations. To play Christy Brown, the Irish artist crippled by cerebral palsy, in My Left Foot, Day-Lewis learned how to paint with his toes, then stayed confined to a wheelchair both on set and off, and demanded that crew members spoon-feed him and wheel him about.

For The Last of the Mohicans, he lived in a teepee in the North American wilds for six months, building himself a canoe, and surviving on food he trapped or hunted. For his role as Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, he took a course in butchery, and despite catching pneumonia refused to wear insulated clothing on the grounds that it wouldn’t have existed in the 19th century.

While making Lincoln, he remained in character, insisting on being addressed as “Mr. President” even off-set and speaking to everyone he met in the folksy, rural Kentucky accent he developed for the part.

It doesn’t help that Day-Lewis is disinclined to discuss his methods of getting into a role, claiming not to understand why journalists even ask him about it. But you have to fill that interview space with something.

Preferably, something more than his confession that he spends days looking out of his window “watching the wind whip across the Wicklow hills.” The impression from such snippets is that he is haunted, reclusive, touchy and rather odd, although evidence of normality exists in his 17-year marriage to Rebecca, daughter of the American playwright Arthur Miller, with whom he has two children.

Lincoln should secure his status as the Britain’s top film actor, even if he doesn’t spend much time in there, or always speak kindly about the place. His admirers will put such neglect down to artistic temperament, and console themselves with the thought that it should not be too many years before we see him again.

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